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Hi vtmoz,
Are you saying that you don't have a header/footer on these pages? No main navigation? No breadcrumbs?
To me, that sounds like a terrible user experience. What is a user supposed to do when they get to these pages? Click the back button in the browser or manually edit the URL in the address bar?
If you do have a header/footer with navigation links, then it's not a dead end page 
Cheers,
David
I believe he is talking about Breadcrumbs - not sitelinks.
To get your breadcrumb rich snippets displaying in the SERPs they must use the appropriate micro data markup.
Some examples on how to implement this can be found here: http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/#breadcrumb And here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/185417?hl=en
Until recently, these breadcrumb links were clickable from the SERPs but like a lot of things in SEO, this was exploited to do things that it wasn't intended to do so Google removed this feature.
You can read about clickable breadcrumb links being removed and why, here : https://www.seroundtable.com/google-breadcrumb-snippets-drop-hyperlink-19595.html
Hi Netzkern,
It actually sounds like you agree with me!
The way you are talking about 'tags' is how most people tend to use categories and sub-categories. I agree that categories and sub-categories are fine (if they have sufficient content, like you said).
Generally, with 'tags', you don't need to be overly strategic with how you use them - they are usually only there for users to find more closely related content on your site (more specific than what the categories or sub-categories offer).
My general advice is to "noindex" tags and never use them to try and grow your organic traffic.
Cheers,
David
Hi Ryan,
Yes, this is the major problem with point-to-point keyword ranking reports and the reason I don't use them (take any increases or decreases with a grain of salt.)
It's possible with these type of ranking reports that G might be testing something at the time the keyword ranking is checked, which could cause it to be reported at a much higher or lower position than you would normally see it.
When looking at keyword rankings, I prefer to look at the average ranking position in Google Search Console because it gives a better indication of how keywords are performing over time.
Cheers,
David
Hi Marcus,
You could add canonical tags on the location pages that have no listings and point them to a top level region or another close-by location that does have listings.
The canonical tag will pass on any authority that each location page has and overcome the duplicate content issues that you are seeing.
I imagine that this would be a nightmare job if it had to be done manually, so hopefully you (or your developer) can set a rule that if there are no listings in a location it automatically points a canonical tag to another relevant page.
Another option would be to "noindex" location pages with no listings. This will solve the duplicate issues but won't pass on any authority the location pages might have.
Cheers
Hi Justin,
Sounds like you already know what you're doing!
I would proceed with exactly what you have said and wouldn't be worried at all about the loss of authority between redirecting to a URL without a / to a URL with a /. The loss of authority will be almost insignificant and you will not lose your rankings or organic traffic from from doing this.
Hi Jon,
A canonical tag can be used as you described, but you may have issues in your case.
The issue is that search engines treat canonical tags as a recommendation, not a directive. Meaning that they can choose to ignore the canonical tag if they think it's not appropriate.
In your case, if the canonicalized (link bait) page is getting more external links than the other page, it could increase the chance of the canonical tag being ignored because search engines might see it as the better page.
I think it would be best to have a single, high-quality page, but if you absolutely must keep the pages separate, use the canonical tag and see how things go.
Cheers,
David
Hi Ben,
You won't get any benefit out of this and I wouldn't recommend doing it just to get "art" in the domain name.
I'd 100% stick with the established .com domain.
Cheers,
David
Correct. It would pass pagerank but Google would also remove the pages from index.
Can you populate the locations with no current listings with random listings from surrounding locations? Or leave older listings live on the page under a heading "Recently Sold" - or something similar?
If you want to overcome duplicate issues and keep the pages indexed, you will need to populate the pages with some sort of unique content you or are going to keep getting these issues.
Hi John,
Just having a quick look at the site I can see a lot of room for improvement!
These category pages are being indexed correctly and ranking well for specific searches (eg. Correctional Services Nursing cpd) so I wouldn't recommend using canonical tags the way you are suggesting. All pages of your site should have a canonical tag pointing to themselves, but I wouldn't be using them to pass authority to other pages in this case.
The URL structure is a bit of a mess so it would be good if you could improve it from:
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd?view=category&cat=9&name=Acute+Surgical+Nursing
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd?view=category&cat=6&name=Medications
To something like:
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd/acute-surgical-nursing/
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd/medications/
You should also pay some attention to the duplicate Page Titles and Meta Descriptions throughout the site 
Cheers,
David
Hi Vic,
Sounds like you are talking about a mobile-specific version of your website and not a responsive website.
I've saw this problem recently and it was because the mobile version of the site was not canonicalized properly to the desktop site.
In this case, the mobile page titles were left blank and Google generated their own by using H1 headings and the URL for branding. When the mobile site was canonicalized correctly, Google quickly started using the same specified titles as the desktop site.
To get this working properly, your desktop website should have something that looks like this:
href="http://m.example.com/page-1">
And your mobile site should have something like this:
This example was taken from Google's Mobile SEO configurations guide.
Check if you have this in place. If not, add it!
The only other time I've seen an issue like this was when the brand name wasn't actually in the page title. Google took what was specified as the WordPress 'Site name' and added that the end of all titles that had no branding.
By what you said, it sounded like you DO have branding in your titles, but if you don't, definitely add it the way want it to appear and don't make Google guess.
Cheers,
David
+1 to what Gaston said!
This is the perfect example of when to use hreflang. It doesn't matter if it's a blog post or a more important page on the site - if you have international versions, use hreflang.
Cheers,
David
If 404 error pages are found in a crawl it means there are internal links to these pages on your site.
If you are using Screaming Frog you can choose to export 'Client Error (4xx) in Links' under the 'Bulk Exports' tab at the top. This will show you where the links are coming from on your site so you can either remove the link or update the link to the new/correct URL.
I would also recommend 301 redirecting the 404 error pages to an appropriate page in case any external sites are linking to these URLs and to pass on any authority these pages might have.
Hi David,
Not having a CMS on the old site will not cause you any issues.
The main thing you need is the 301 redirects to the new domain. You should also make sure that the redirects from the old domain are redirecting to the corresponding page on the new domain.
IE. You shouldn't be redirecting all pages from the old domain to the homepage on the new domain.
You might see some decreases in organic traffic for a week or two after the change, but it should pick up to its previous levels once search engines have properly crawled and indexed everything again.
Cheers,
David
Hi Vic,
I've had a look at the site and have the following notes:
When I search for the main keywords in the title, the brand name displays in lowercase as it should.
When i search for the brand name, Google ignores the page title and shows only the brand name and includes capitalized letters.
The other issue here is that it ranks the .com domain instead of the .co.uk domain. I used a UK IP address and Google.co.uk and still got the .com ranking for the brand search.
The reason for this is that there are no hreflang tags in place between the two sites. Are you also seeing this? (I want to make sure it's not just me!)
With the branding change on mobile, the only thing I would try is moving the brand name to the front of the title tag for the homepage. I always include branding at the front of homepage titles because Google tends to re-write them that way. I know that's not the case here with how this site appears on desktop search, but everything else looks fine and I would recommend giving it a try!
I'll be interested to see if that solves the problem.
Cheers,
David
Hi Muzz,
No need to use hreflang if you only have your content available for a single region/language..
If you eventually have your content available in other regions/languages, whether it's on the same domain or a different domain, you should definitely use hreflang to ensure the locations are being served the most relevant version of your content.
Cheers,
David
There's nothing stopping the site from being crawled or indexed so I would say that your site just happened to be down when Googlebot attempted to crawl it.
If downtime is a rare occurrence, this one time won't cause you any SEO-related issues and the message will be cleared in the next few days when the site is successfully crawled.
You can track downtime with a tool like Pingdom and if it becomes an issue it would be worth looking into upgrading you web hosting.
Hi Becky,
Like Tymen said, separators in titles are fine - not matter which separator you choose to use.
Google will still reads and indexes the full title and will not cut off at the first separator.
I wouldn't be too concerned about where your separator is cutting off potential search queries - there are much bigger factors to consider before thinking too much about this.
Cheers,
David
Hi Dreamrealemedia,
I would have absolutely no concerns about losing rankings/traffic from making the changes you've mentioned.
Optimizing image files to improve page load and improving keyword targeting in title/alt text - you can't go wrong with that.
Cheers,
David
Hi Dawn,
Sounds like you may have recently switch to https?
If you did and you are still viewing the http Search Console account, you should expect to see a huge drop in all areas of this account and you will need to setup a new https account to view accurate data.
Cheers,
David
Hi Omar,
I recently went through a domain change on one of my own sites and saw similar decreases in traffic.
The site changed from http://www.oldsite.com to https://newsite.com
I know that my changeover was 100% flawless in terms of precautions and things that were implemented to prevent/minimize traffic loss, but I still saw a 50-70% decrease (this was also a Google News site - which had to be resubmitted after the domain change).
I posted a thread on Google's Webmaster Central Help Forum to see if anyone else knew why there was such a decrease in traffic and was surprised to have a few people contact me privately saying they were/are going through the same thing.
My site took 17 days before seeing a sudden jump in traffic and it continued a steady growth over the following 4 weeks. 17 days was around the same time frame it took for the others to see their traffic pick up.
Provided you've done everything correctly with the site migration, my advice is "hang in there" (which I know is hard)! It shouldn't be long before you start to see things pick up again!
Cheers,
David
Hi TapGoods,
In Search Console, next to the red 'ADD A PROPERTY' button, there is a grey 'Create a set' button.
Click this button and you can group your accounts and be able to view a combined data from these accounts.
You can read more about this here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6338828
With the Moz data, once you've created your property set, give Moz access to the set instead of the single account it would've had access to.
About the sitemap, assuming that the four URLs resolve to a single URL (which they should), you only need to submit your sitemap to the account for the URL that your site uses.
Cheers,
David
Hi Jon,
People usually try to click on logos when they see them but you could use some sort of click tracking/heat mapping program to confirm if they are or not. If they are trying to click, it would be a good idea to link them to something.
Where to link to depends on the type of site it is and how it's monetized.
Without knowing much about the site, I would probably link to a brand page on your own site but it could make sense to link directly to the brand's site if you are an affiliate with these brands. If you don't get any benefit from sending traffic to these brands, definitely keep the links internal!
Linking internally to brand pages on your site can also help you to rank organically for these brand terms - which can be a great driver of organic traffic.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
David
Hi Meler,
If GA is missing data on what you say are some of your top pages, it sounds like they might be missing GA tracking codes or it may be implemented incorrectly.
First thing I would do here is check that all your pages do in fact have working GA tracking.
You can use Screaming Frog to crawl your site to quickly identify pages that may be missing tracking codes.
Cheers,
David
Hi Jonathon,
I wouldn't be worried about the scubamaui.com hurting your performance - there are definitely bigger factors that would be affecting the site.
Looking at your backlink profile in Ahrefs, I can see that you have a lot of dodgy blog and profile links with exact-match anchor text. Have these links been disavowed?
Examples of some bad links:
http://skitripvacation.com/blog/travel/4168-excited-about-maui-activities
http://maribethvaladez213.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/activities-and-tours-in-maui.html
http://www.betternetworker.com/members/ptevemark7
There's also an issue with headings tags being used incorrectly, eg. you have 19 h1 headings on your homepage and 4 h1 headings on just about all other pages.
The first h1 heading on most of your pages is '__You are not logged in yet', which is not great.
You should only have one h1 heading per page and you should make sure it describes what the page is about.
Cheers,
David
Hi Mike,
Yes, after 2-3 weeks we saw the new site ranking well for the same keywords the old site used to and was getting 80-90% of the organic traffic that those pages were getting on the old site.
This was about 6 months ago and the new site now gets more organic traffic than those pages ever got on the old site.
I'd love to hear how things go for you!
Cheers,
David
Hi JMB,
I agree with Andy and think what you've done will work well.
What CMS does the site use?
I've worked on plenty of big Magento e-commerce sites (from 5k to 5mil pages - so not quite your 60 mil!), but Magento handles this kind of thing very well by default, and in much the same way you have described.
Magento always canonicalizes product URLs to the base URL, no matter what product category they are in.
Eg. a product could be available under multiple categories and it will always use the same canonical tag:
yoursite.com/category-1/product-name/
yoursite.com/category-1/sub-cat/product-name/
yoursite.com/category-1/sub-cat-2/product-name/
yoursite.com/category-2/product-name/
All of these variations would be canonicalized to:
This works perfectly and I've never seen any issues with this.
The only difference with yours is that products are canonicalized to a main category - which actually sounds better to me because then the canonical URL is actually linked from the site (not just "linked" through canonical tags).
I think you'll see some great results with what you've done! But it might take a few months to see the results on a site that size!
Cheers,
David
Hi Brian,
This is a really tough one to respond to without knowing the domain and being able to have a look at it.
If you PM me the domain, I'd be happy to take a look and see if I can find anything (I won't mention the domain publicly).
Cheers,
David
Hi poke1,
What percentage of your page content are these duplicated sentences?
If it's 2 sentences out of a 50, I think you'll be fine. If its 2/3, you may want to look at improving the value/quality of those pages.
It's hard to say without looking at the site.
HOWEVER, I think you identified your main problem when you said that your website "produces high-quality automatically generated textual content".
Spun/automatically generated content is always a bad idea and would be a Panda issue, no matter how good you think the automatically generated content is.
I'd recommend that you stop using this automatically generated content and start creating your own valuable content.
Cheers,
David
Hi HLTalk,
You are right about disavowing at a domain level.
This is usually the option I go for because (generally) it's the overall domain that's spam, and rarely an individual URL (of course, there will be exceptions) and if you disavow at a URL level you run the risk of missing some URLs which may not be picked up in various SEO tools at the time.
For the example in your first post, you would need the following in your disavow file:
domain:domainPizza.net
domain:domainPizza.com
domain:domainpizza.org
domain:sub.domainPizza.com
Whether it's http://, http://www., https://, https://www., doesn't matter - this doesn't need to be specified in the disavow file. Sub-domains are treated as a separate domain and do need to be specified in the disavow file.
As ThompsonPaul pointed out below, sub-domains will also be disavowed when you disavow at a domain level.
Cheers,
David
Hi Brandon,
Sounds like you might've updated the site template and removed some sitewide links to partner sites or social profiles.
Have you made any template changes (or header/footer changes) recently?
And just FYI, more external links doesn't mean you are doing better than your competition and the drop in external links doesn't necessarily mean you've done something wrong.
Cheers,
David
Hi Jamie,
It sounds like you may not have implemented 301 redirects from the old site to the new site.
If that's the case, go and add these for each page asap! This could be all you need to get your rankings back.
Was it just a straight rebrand? Did the website template and content remain the same when the rebrand took place?
Feel free to send me a PM with the domain names and I can take a quick look for you to see if there are any other issues from the changeover.
Cheers,
David
Ahhh yes, you are correct!
You might be able to get some highly relevant referral traffic from forums, so forum links aren't completely useless.
But as Logan and Martijn said, if you are doing this type of link building purely for SEO reasons, then your time is definitely better spent elsewhere.
Cheers,
David
Hi manoman88,
Sounds like you know what you're doing and the short answer is yes, what you have outlined above is the perfect use for hreflang tags despite there being slight variations in the product available to these different countries.
Cheers,
David
Hi,
You can run a crawl in Screaming Frog without JavaScript rendering enabled to see how well your site can be crawled without JavaScript.
That will be a lot faster than trying to simulate a crawl manually.
Cheers,
David
Hi spacecollective,
Firstly, I love the site and I'll be buying a gift for my dad's birthday from here!
There are definitely some issues with canonical tag and redirect chains here. I'd say it's an issue with the development of the site that is now causing SEO issues - so it's an issue for both!
I'll use the product you mentioned in my example:
http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=themecontrol/product&product_id=159
canonicalizes to
http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2/
which redirects to
http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-pin-sets/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2
which canonicalizes to
http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/nasa-pin-sets/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2/
All of these URLs should have the same canonical URL. I always prefer to canonicalize products that appear under multiple categories to the root level (it's also what Magento does by default and it works very well).
So, in this example, all variations would have a canonical tag pointing to
http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2/
However, in your OpenCart CMS, it may be easier to canonicalize these to the final URL in the chain (http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/nasa-pin-sets/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2/) as this is also the URL that is listed in the XML sitemap.
If you choose to canonicalize to the root level, you will need to make sure that the sitemap is updated to only include this new canonical URLs.
Hope this helps. Feel free to send me a PM if you have any further questions
Cheers,
David
Hi wonderdome,
You are correct that Bit.ly is for shortening links but it isn't something you use for link building and it doesn't make the link for valuable when you use it.
And that it a huge number of bit.ly links - it must be a huge site! My guess is they use bit.ly links for all of their social media posting.
Cheers,
David
Hi Green_Web,
It looks like you have the same default title tag for all of your blog posts. The main pages on the site look like they have more suitable title tags.
The blog section looks like it's in WordPress and has a default title tag in place, which hopefully is not hardcoded into the post template.
If you don't have access or have the ability to edit titles, I would suggest talking to the devs and get them to use the post name in the title, but ideally, you would be able to independently modify all page titles through a plugin like Yoast.
The reason you may be seeing a more suitable title tag sometimes is that Google won't always use your specified title tag in SERPs - it can sometimes use your h1 heading (for example) if it thinks that is more relevant to the user's search query.
Cheers,
David
Nothing to do with a penalty. Nothing to do with negative SEO.
The problem here is that your site is noindexed...
Remove the meta robots noindex and I'd say you'll start to see your site ranking again.
Cheers,
David
Hi Chris,
I've been getting this for the last month or so. Sometimes I have to try 2-3 times but it eventually works and hasn't caused me too many issues. I figured it might've just been a busy time of the day...or it maybe it was my slow internet connection at the time...I really don't know.
Would love to know if this is a known problem that's being looked at, but like I said, it doesn't cause me too many dramas and I don't think I've had to retry more than 3 times.
Hopefully someone from Moz can say why this might be happening
Cheers,
David
Hi Rodney,
Take a look at this article titled "Large Site SEO Basics: Faceted Navigation" by Serge Stefoglo: https://moz.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation
It covers what you want to know in great detail and discusses the various options for handling faceted navigation for SEO.
Cheers,
David
Yes, you'll need to remove it.
In WordPress, if you go to Settings > Reading, it's most likely that your developer has left the box checked that says "Discourage search engines from indexing this site".
Uncheck that box and you should be all good.
Cheers,
David
Hi Annabel,
OSE and other link tools may tell you if a site is linking to you, but they are not foolproof because it depends on whether those tools have indexed those links - which could take months.
The best way to check if a site is linking to you is with Screaming Frog.
Crawl the site you want to check and go to 'Bulk Export' > 'External Links'.
This will give you a spreadsheet with all the external links on that domain and from there you can find any links to your domain.
Cheers,
David
"create some backlinks using the keywords" sounds super dodgy!!
You shouldn't be the one creating links to your site.
You have really good content and I don't think you'll have much trouble getting links to your site with a bit of outreach and relationship building with other quality sites in your niche.
Don't ruin your awesome content by link building like it's 2010.
Cheers,
David
Hi Alex,
I worked on a site a while ago that did something like this to get the location of users in order to serve them location-dependent product pricing.
These redirects didn't seem to hurt their organic performance at all, but the devs eventually got around to using some simple JavaScript to obtain location information, and the redirects were scrapped.
Is the site you are talking about using redirects to get location information? If so, I'd suggest speaking with the devs to come up with an alternative.
Cheers,
David
Hi Ryan,
It would be best to use Screaming Frog if you want a true indication of your internal link structure.
https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Cheers,
David
Hi Christian,
The current robots.txt shouldn't be blocking those URLs.
Did you or someone else recently change the robots.txt file? If so, give Google a few days to re-crawl your site.
Also, can you check what happens when you do a fetch and render on one of the blocked posts in Search Console? Do you have issues there?
Cheers,
David